Starting Minecraft in your school

Once you have decided you want to use Minecraft in your school, and your school has agreed with you that it’s a good idea and worth a try, you’ll have to solve a number of issues. Luckily, there are many places where you can – nowadays – turn to for help. It’s fantastic how willing those who have fought this battle on their own are to help overcome these obstacles!

Technical issues: To serve or not to serve…

You will have to decide whether to run your own server, or to use a server provided by someone else.

Hosting your own server

Lucas Gillispie put a good introduction to the issues involved in running your own server on the MinecraftInSchool workspace. He also outlines a number of organisational issues you should clarify in your school at the outset.

MinecraftEDU was set up by @MinecraftTeacher Joel Levin and others. It is an international collaborative project, and is cooperating with Mojang, the company behind Minecraft, so that it is able to offer educational game licences at considerable discount. They are hoping to introduce training for educators soon, and they are offering a “mod,” or modifying piece of software, aimed specifically at those intending to use Minecraft in their schools.

MinecraftEDU could possibly solve a lot of initial problems these educators could have:

At the very outset, the mod tackles one of the biggest barriers to implementing Minecraft at school — that is, setting up your own private Minecraft server. The MinecraftEDU mod allows teachers to do this with just a few clicks, turning their own PCs (Mac, Windows or Linux) into a local server. Audrey Watters

This site also contains precise information on what needs to be done to set up Minecraft in a school through MinecraftEDU, and what the cost involved are.

Using a server

If you decide to use the services of an outside provider to set up your students for play, here are some where you could start your search: